gardening – grouchyfarmer

Yes I’m Still Alive!

I know it’s been ages since I wrote anything here but that’s because it’s been crazy busy here at grouchyfarmer.com’s palatial headquarters. The gardens were spectacularly prolific this year and dealing with all of that has been a struggle for me and MrsGF. It’s October 4 as I write this, it is 91(F) degrees out there, and we’re still harvesting peppers and tomatoes. Plus the brussel sprouts are now starting to come on strong and we have something like 15 big butternut squash ready to pick that we’re going to need to deal with.

We’ve given up trying to process the stuff ourselves. We ran out of freezer space and canning jars long ago. We’ve been giving it to two or three of the local food pantries and they’ve been very grateful to get the stuff. The food pantries have been struggling to keep up with demand over the last few months as it is, and because of recent funding cuts the demand has only been increasing. We took about 40 lbs of tomatoes to one pantry and about 15 pounds of jalapeno and bell peppers and our friend who volunteers there said it was all gone within a couple of hours.

Still the end is here for both the tomatoes and peppers. We’re going to do one last picking of both and then the plants are going to get yanked. The tomatoes stopped blossoming some time ago and the existing fruit is almost done developing. The peppers are still flowering somehow but have slowed down to where there’s no point to keeping it going. We’re going to wait until the weather cools down a bit before we tackle all of that though.

Speaking of weather, it has been seriously strange. It’s the first week of October. It should be in the low 50s at the most, with temperatures getting down close to freezing or even a bit below that this time of year. Instead we’ve been locked in this streak of hot weather for weeks now with daytime highs pushing well into the 80s or more. Normally we might get a few days of warmer weather this time of year, but not this warm and not for this long.

When I haven’t been puttering in the garden I’ve been busy cranking out a whole new line of hopefully amusing drinks coasters and re-drawing the artwork on the old ones to reprint some of those. Looking at the artwork on some of those first ones I made makes me wince today. So before re-printing any of those I’ve been cleaning up the artwork or even re-doing it entirely.

I also have other stuff in the works, like engraving coins, making specialty tokens and quite possibly custom glassware and other goodies. Thanks in part to a new acquisition, that weird looking thingie over there on the left.

That’s a Wecreat Lumos 3W infrared and 10W blue diode laser that comes with a flatbed conveyer thingie and a rotating thingie that I have yet to play with but will hopefully get set up yet this weekend.

Ooo, it’s got a rotating thingie! Cam’t wait to play with that.

It definitely is not going to be replacing the Falcon laser engraver/cutter. This one is entirely inappropriate for jobs I use the Falcon for. This one is going to be for specifically doing metal engraving and, hopefully glassware and jewelry.

Keep an eye out for a full blown review of the Lumos in the future. It is both enormously useful and great fun to use, and enormously frustrating at the same time. Which seems to be about par for the course for these things.

It’s main use here is for metal. Even as we speak it’s engraving “challenge coins” for a small scale production run. It’s not fast, true. I wouldn’t want to have to use this to try to crank out a significant number of items. But for a run of a dozen or so items it’s not too bad.

Anyway, more about that later as I said.

The new EG4 12000XP inverter is more or less installed and working just fine. It’s still in “testing mode” so to speak as you can see in the photo because we haven’t finalized the wiring. Those of you who are yelling at the screen about the wiring not meeting code and all of that, I probably know the NEC better than you do and I should point out that when that photo was taken we were still testing and hadn’t yet finalized the wiring. So before you launch into some kind of rant about it in the comments, just don’t.

There were some teething issues with the 12000XP, but they were minor. The first was it wasn’t “talking” to the batteries. That turned out to be a communications configuration error that was quickly corrected. The second was an odd glitch where the AC side would trip out with an overload error if there was power coming from the solar panels, and if the batteries were at 100% SOC an if there was an AC load of more than about 200W. And only if all three of those criteria were met. That turned out to require a software update and as soon as the firmware was updated it was working just fine indeed.

Now we just need to get the new solar panels up on the garage roof. They’ve been sitting in the garage since February waiting for eldest son to clear up some time on his calendar to work on it because MrsGF won’t let me do more than climb a step ladder after she caught up up that tree last spring stringing up an antenna.

And that’s about it for now. Thought I’d better post something to reassure the people who thought I was dead or something. Hopefully the Lumos review will be coming up in the near future.

Catching Up: Gardens, Flowers and a Norton. Wait, Did He Say Norton?

Weather around here has been odd, to say the least. We went from the dryest summer we had in decades with a full blown drought, to a dry, winter that was one of the warmest on record, to a cool, rainy spring and moved now into a muggy, rainy summer. The rivers around here that were literally bone dry last summer are full to overflowing and the ground is so saturated that even a light shower results in flash flood warnings being issued.

Crops out in the farm fields around here look, well, they’re horrible. There’s no other way to put it. Except for a few fields which are on high ground and well drained just about everything is stunted and looking pretty sad because of the almost non-stop rain we’ve been getting.

Still, here at grouchyfarmer.com’s palatial headquarters, the gardens are doing pretty much fantastic. The raspberries are in full swing right now. We don’t have a lot of them but the ones we do have are doing the best I’ve ever seen them. Big, lush, juicy fruits with intense flavor.

The cucumbers are looking great as well. They’re in full flower right now. All the varieties of peppers we put in are already starting to produce fruit and some are even getting big enough to pick here pretty soon. When I was out in the heat mowing lawn this afternoon I saw some banana peppers almost 5 inches long, just about the perfect size for eating fresh.

The flowering plants have been doing great as well. We tried something a bit silly with the stump from the old ash tree out back. We built a sort of retaining wall with round blocks of wood cut from the tree itself, filled it with dirt, and planted it with zinnias and wild flowers just to see what would happen. And this is the result.

I don’t know about you, but I’m enormously pleased with the results. Once the rest of the zinnias start to flower that’s going to be amazing.

Okay, the Norton. What’s a Norton, you ask? It’s a classic British motorcycle manufacturer. Back in the day I owned a 1968 750 Norton that I had a love/hate relationship with. It was temperamental, had one of the worst electrical systems ever devised by man, vibrated so badly every nut and bolt and screw on it had to be wired down so they didn’t fall off, was almost impossible to start when it got moody, and the exhaust system fell off on a regular basis. People would see me sitting at the side of the road having a smoke with the bike and stop and ask if I needed help. Nope, I’d say. Just waiting for the damned exhaust to cool down, and I’d point to the exhaust pipes laying in the ditch.

In other words it was pretty much a classic British motorcycle.

Great fun, that bike. I eventually sold it for $400. I heard later that two days after I sold it the new owner had neglected to follow any of the warnings I’d given him about preventative maintenance and the care and feeding of Brit bikes and had almost immediately run the engine tight. Sigh…

So that brings me to this.

Yeah. It’s a Norton. A 1973 850 Commando. Despite the way it looks, it is all there. The seat, gas tanks and everything else are all there. Somewhere. And apparently it’s mine. I guess. Maybe. It’s a bit up in the air at the moment. It belonged to my late best friend and brother in law John who died two years ago. I don’t know where he got it or what he was doing with it because he was strictly a Harley guy. His wife, also one of my best friends and my wife’s sister, wants to get rid of it. It was sitting in the garage covered with a sheet and since all of John’s friends are Harley guys, nobody seems to want to buy it or even deal with an old British bike. So it might be mine. Maybe? We’ll see.

Damn, I’m tempted…

Garden Update

So here it is, mid-June, and the gardens here are going a bit crazy. everything is growing fast thanks to frequent rain and relatively mild temperatures. We have had critter problems, though. Here’s our pole beans, for example.

They should be much bigger than this but something, we suspect rabbits, ate the top leaves off the plants after they got about 4 inches tall. The red stuff you see on the plants and soil up there is crushed dried red pepper, a type normally used for making kimchi. I buy the stuff in 2 pound bags off Amazon. Whatever critters are eating our plants seem to dislike this stuff enormously. It’s a relatively inexpensive way to repel the little buggers without having to resort to traps or toxic chemicals. You definitely do not want to handle the stuff with your bare hands if you have cuts or scrapes, and make damned sure you wash your hands thoroughly after scattering it around because if you accidentally rub your eyes… Well let’s just say you’ll have the delightful experience of learning what it’s like to be pepper sprayed.

I never used to like cilantro but then a few years ago it was like a switch flipped in my head and I started to love the stuff. Why? Who knows.

We put in lots of cilantro this year. We were told by someone who supposedly “knows these things” that it would repel the critters eating our plants. It doesn’t. But it does taste amazing! I’m always astonished by the difference in taste and smell between the home grown stuff and even the “fresh” herbs we get at the grocery store. We bought a couple of bunches of fresh cilantro at Walmart in late winter for a special Mexican dinner we did and it was really rather sad. Had very little flavor. This stuff will knock your socks off. Bright, brilliant flavor and aroma… Damn I need to stop talking about food. I’m getting hungry.

MrsGF ran a batch through the dehydrator to see how that works out.

We planted quite a few carrots this year. We need to get out there and thin them out or it’s going to be a mess. Rabbits never bother carrots. Despite the Bugs Bunny cartoons, rabbits don’t like carrots all that much and they hate the green tops.

The onions… I don’t know what’s going on with the onions this year but they’ve been going nuts. I looked back at photos from the last couple of years and this year the onions are literally twice as big as they were at this time in previous years. I’m not complaining. I’m just wondering why?

The beets got hit hard by the critters. Almost all the beet tops were chewed off before we noticed and started putting out the pepper flakes. Some managed to survive but they look rather poorly. Just to make sure we get something we planted more. A bit late but we should still get something.

The celery is looking amazing as well this year. It’s already about 8 inches tall and looking beautiful. Celery is another one of those plants where there is no comparison between the flavor of the store bought varieties and the home grown ones. Interestingly, people are so used to the insipid flavor and aroma of grocery store celery that when they encounter really good, full flavor celery they think it’s too intensely flavored and don’t like it.

Let’s wrap this up with Doofus Cat…

That’s what I’ve started to call her because, well, that’s what she is, a doofus. I love her dearly and she’s a sweet heart but let’s face it, she’s just not very bright. The other morning she was trying to lick up a dark spot on the wood floor in the dining room because she thought it was a cat treat. Sigh…

She has her own comfy pillow back there in the office that she can snooze on. You can see it just to the lower left. But she’s decided she’d rather nap on top of the printer for some reason.

She is also a big kitty. She’s bigger than a lot of the dogs in the neighborhood. She weighs about 13 pounds and it’s all muscle. I’ve seen her do a standing high jump from the living room floor to the mantle above the fireplace, almost 5 feet straight up, without even straining herself.

Catching Up: Solar, Gardening, Flowers, New Computer and Stuff

All kinds of stuff have been going on here at the palatial headquarters of grouchyfarmer.com.

I believe I mentioned that we had to have the roof replaced a few weeks ago. I had to remove all of the solar panels before they came in, and, as usual, I’ve been exceptionally lazy and didn’t get the solar panels back up until today. MrsGF handles most of the household billing and she noticed the difference right away when our electric bill suddenly jumped up about $65, so she’s been after me to finally get them out of the garage and out in the sunlight. So we’re back to running on solar again. 🙂 Unfortunately we have a lot of clouds floating through here after a cold front came through so I suspect we’re possibly using almost as much battery power as we are solar. Still, even when a cloud passes over we’re still getting about 400 – 500W out of the panels.

I’m writing this on a brand new computer. I finally bit the bullet, got out the credit card and bought a new Macbook Pro to replace the rather elderly and beat up Macbook I normally write on. I use two computers. The Macbook lives in the dining room where it’s my primary computer for doing email, writing this blog, doing correspondence, accounting, tax stuff, budget projections, banking and sometimes simple photo editing.

The other computer is an MSI gaming computer with a high speed Core i7 processor, Geforce graphics card, loaded up with RAM and all those goodies. I occasionally do actual gaming on it, but mostly it’s a working computer that is hooked to my 3D printer, laser engravers and my amateur radio equipment. And because it’s screaming fast, all my Adobe editing tools are on it as well. Plus it’s ended up being my archive computer connected to multiple external drives with my video library, old radio show collection, etc.

My old Macbook was not long for this world, I suspect. It was so old and had been used so much the lettering was literally worn or chipped off most of the keys. So old that it couldn’t run my modern Adobe software. It was getting to be more and more of a pain in the neck to use so I got the new Macbook Pro with the new M3 Pro CPU and new graphics system.

Wow, what a difference! The new screen is amazingly good. And fast? Wow. I don’t think it’s quite as fast as my MSI gaming system but it’s damned close. Even better Photoshop and my other editing tools all work flawlessly and remarkably fast on this new one. So I’m pleased. Apple even makes it absurdly simple to switch to a new computer. Just start up a transfer utility on both computers, they link together wirelessly, and in less than an hour everything from the old computer was on the new computer, including all of my settings, passwords, favorites, photos, videos, everything.

Speaking of computers, I suspect Win 11 is going to be the last version of Windows I will ever run thanks to the crap Microsoft is indulging in now. If you haven’t heard about the company’s latest attempt at utterly destroying your life, Microsoft is starting to implement something it calls Recall. Basically Recall is the ultimate in spyware. It records everything you read, everything you type, every video you view, ever website you visit, every document you write/read, every email you receive/send, all of your banking information, all of your passwords. Everything. All of it easily searchable, and all of it unencrypted, at least according to people who’ve been able to try it.

That squishing, gasping noise you just heard is every scammer, every stalker, every hacker, every malware maker, every corrupt government, every abusive government agency everywhere in the world having a collective orgasm over the fact that some day soon, Microsoft is going to be recording literally everything that flows through your computer for your “convenience”.

But I’m wandering off topic, so let me get on with this.

The weather here has been a bit odd, but not so odd that it would be considered extraordinary. We’ve gone from drought like conditions to almost an overabundance of rain over the last month. Precipitation has been well above average and temperatures have been on the cool side. With only a few exceptions daytime highs have struggled to get above 70F. Fortunately we had enough dry days to let farmers get their crops it, but now they’re struggling to try to get their hay crops off the fields.

For gardeners like me and MrsGF it’s been pretty good. While temps have been a bit cooler than we’d like the abundant rain has eliminated the need to water stuff. And despite the cool temps things are growing well out there.

The onions planted around the outside of the raised beds have been doing amazingly well. They seem to thrive in this weather. All of our other plants are up and doing pretty well. We put in carrots, beets, celery, pole beans, cilantro, lettuce and onions in the raised beds and those are all doing quite well.

We have 6 tomato plants in the corner garden by the AC unit. They’re doing reasonably well. The parsley in front was a carry over from last year and even that’s doing quite well. The stuff is almost knee high. I didn’t think Parsley plants survived over winter but these did somehow.

We have about 11 or 12 pepper plants of various types in that narrow strip along the side of the house. We’ve been putting peppers in there for some time now and they do amazingly well in there. We probably over did it with pepper plants. I think we have something like 20 of the darned things all together, a mixture of sweet bell, banana peppers, jalapeno and I think there are a few pimento plants in there too. MrsGF and I both love peppers. We freeze them, can them, pickle them. One trick we tried that worked well was to keep them whole, cut the tops off and take out the seed core, and then freeze them whole and use them to make stuffed peppers.

And we got the first rose of the season!

I’m still out on the bike on the trails and backroads whenever the weather cooperates. I’m afraid my average speed when I’m out biking isn’t as good as it could be because every time I see some wild flowers I have to stop and take pictures.

That’s not a bad thing, but it does mean that what should be a one hour ride generally turns into two hours.

The raspberries are just starting to bud. I’m really looking forward to that.

We don’t grow a lot of them. Technically I’m not supposed to eat them at all because I have diverticulosis and I’m not supposed to eat anything with seeds, but come on, who can resist fresh raspberries?

It’s been an expensive month here. New roof, new computer and now a new dishwasher as well.

That’s a Bosch 800 and it came highly recommended. Reviews I’ve seen pretty much consistently rate it as a top of the line dishwasher. My eldest son and his wife have one and love it. Me? I hate it.

Oh, okay, I don’t hate it. It works just fine. I just don’t like it very much. The small third rack at the top of the interior compartment is pretty much utterly useless, the racks are oddly laid out making it awkward to get dishes stacked into the thing, the removable silverware basket is half as big as it should be. But I’m told your silverware is supposed to go up in that stupid 3rd rack at the top, where it just sort of lays there and flies around whenever you pull the rack out, even if you carefully place the silverware in the provided slots.

Yes, it does a perfectly fine job cleaning dishes, but so did our old LG which cost half as much and did just as good a job at cleaning.

But that’s about it for now. I have way too much to do and too little time to do it, so I’m out of here for now!

Out And About

This is what a typical corn planting operation looks like around here these days. It’s a far cry from the ancient 4 row John Deere planter I used to pull!

Today and yesterday were both absolutely glorious. Brilliant sunshine, warm temperatures, pleasant breezes. I couldn’t have asked for finer weather. So I was out biking around the countryside instead of hanging around the house doing chores because, well, the hell with chores when the weather is this nice!

The farmers have been out in full force planting corn and harvesting first crop hay. We’ve had almost perfect weather for farming so far this spring. It’s about time they get a break. Out at my brother-in-law’s place they put in something like 350 acres of beans and corn in one day.

The sheer size of the equipment they use still seems astonishing to me. Shouldn’t be, I suppose. People have been farming like this for decades now. When I was still actively farming the biggest tractor we had was an Oliver 1655 with a whopping 70 HP that we payed $6,500 for. That tracked CaseIH up there is probably around 400HP and I suspect would sell for well over a quarter of a million, used.

Even something as simple as making hay has turned into an industrial sized operation with massive self propelled forage harvesters and an endless stream of semi-trucks.

But I wasn’t all that interested in agriculture, I wanted to get off the roads and on the trails because of, well, things like this…

It’s spring, after all, and everything is growing, is lush, is in flower. There are flowers almost everywhere I looked and the air was heavy with the most intoxicating scent of a world in full blossom.

But let’s take a peek at the backyard. We have a lot going on out there too.

Every year we try to do something different. This year it’s celery. We’ve grown it before as an experiment a few years ago and it did reasonably well. Well enough that we’re willing to take a chance on planting a whole bed of it this year. Yes, I know celery is pretty cheap but it isn’t the cost, it’s the flavor. Store bought celery is a sad, insipid and flavorless thing when compared to the home grown varieties. The flavor can be so intense that people who are used to the stuff they pick up at the grocery store find it a bit overwhelming, really. Hopefully it does reasonably well. I’m looking forward to this.

We have lots of other stuff in the ground now. Lots of onions. We grow onions around the outside borders of all of the raised beds. A lot of them will get shaded out and won’t grow that large once the other plants get bigger. Don’t care. Even the small onions taste wonderful. The onions won’t last long. They’re almost big enough now to start pulling some. Usually we get enough to eat fresh all summer long. We put in a mix of red, yellow and white onions just for a bit of variety.

We put in lots of beets and carrots this year as well. Again, beets and carrots are pretty cheap to buy. For us the big incentive is the flavor. You don’t know what a really good carrot tastes like until you’ve grown your own.

This corner garden up there in the photo is all tomatoes this year. We make our own tomato sauces, chili sauces, tomato soup, etc. and we actually used all of the home grown stuff and had to resort to buying some the other day and dear lord it tasted horrible!

I don’t have photos but as usual we planted the whole south side “flower garden” along the edge of the living room with pepper plants. We thought we’d gone overboard with bell and banana peppers last year. We didn’t, it seems, because the freezer is empty. We put in a mix of sweet bell, banana, and a new variety of jalapeno this year that is supposed to have all of the flavor of a jalapeno but with less heat. We’ll see how those go.

And to wrap this up, how about a lilac?

The lilacs are in full bloom all over town and the fragrance is absolutely amazing. Damn it’s beautiful out there, so why am I sitting in the house writing this? I’m going out to smell the flowers.

It’s Autumn. Time for a Fall Catch Up.

On the bike trail between Hilbert and Forest Junction. This trail and most of the others around here follow old railroad lines that ran between small towns before they were abandoned.

The calendar may say this is the first day of autumn but it hasn’t felt like it for the last few days. Daytime highs have been pushing 80 and it’s been remarkably pleasant out there. I’ve been out on the bike rather a lot enjoying the nice weather while it’s here.

But it’s dry. Very, very dry. This is what the river north of town usually looks like.

Below is what it looks like now.

I’ve lived in this area since the late 1980s and I’ve never seen the river like this before.

Yeah, completely dry. So dry I could walk across it without getting my shoes muddy.

MrsGF and I have been working on cleaning up some of the gardens. The squash, wax beans and pole beans are all done and we have those all cleaned out and have been working on bringing in some fresh compost.

The beans did not do very well this year. Both the pole and wax beans didn’t seem to thrive. Lots of vegetation and blossoms, but not many beans. I’m not sure why. I think partly that was because of a lack of bees. I saw a lot of bumble bees out there this year but I didn’t see a single honey bee all summer long. And the bumbles seemed to avoid the bean blossoms. Or it could have been the hot, dry weather. We watered the gardens almost every day this summer but it still might have been too dry for the beans.

The squash were fantastic this year, big, beautiful butternut squash, and a lot of them. We ended up with the entire wagon full of them. Excellent quality as well.

We ended up with a lot more than we needed so we gave a lot away to friends and family or traded them for things we didn’t have like pears.

We tried a different variety of tomato this year, something called Amish Gold Slicers, a yellow variety. They had excellent flavor but I was disappointed by the yield. At the moment the plants are still going, still have lots of green fruit, but the fruit seems to have stopped maturing. We’ve had almost no ripe ones at all over the last week or so. No idea what’s going on there. I’m hoping that will change, but the way things are now we aren’t going to get much more off of them. They also had a thick, tough skin making them hard to cut unless we used a freshly sharpened knife. Overall they were a bit disappointing and I don’t think we’ll be using that variety again.

We put in sweet bell peppers, jalapenos and banana peppers this year and they all did well. Are still doing well, especially the jalapenos. They’re producing like crazy still, loaded with young fruit and blossoms.

But even the peppers have been a bit odd this year. The jalapenos heat levels have been strange. One will be so sweet and have so little heat I could eat them like candy, and the one right next to it, from the same plant, would be so hot my eyes would water and I ran to the fridge for some milk to try to quench the fire.

The bell peppers were excellent but we let some ripen to turn red and when we cut them open the entire seed cavity was full of mold. Very strange. I’d never seen that before.

The brussel sprouts are looking excellent. I still think they’re one of the goofiest plants I’ve ever seen, but they’re doing well and we’ve had some of the sprouts for dinner a week or so ago and damn, they taste good!

That being said I’m not sure we’re going to plant them again. They take up a lot of space and don’t really produce enough sprouts to justify the amount of garden space they use. So while they were a success, we aren’t sure if they’re worth the effort.

Of course me being me I can’t do one of these without putting up a picture of a flower, so here you go…

There, I got that out of the way. So let’s move on with this.

E-bike update: I bought the Vado e-bike in mid-July of last year so I’ve had it for 14 months now so let’s take a look at how that’s worked out. In that time I’ve put about 1,300 miles on it and it’s worked flawlessly. I’ve had absolutely no problems at all with it. Mechanically and electronically it’s worked exactly as advertised. I love the thing. Range for a bike this heavy is excellent. Cruising at around 12 – 14 mph in Eco mode it does about 1 mile for a bit more than 1% battery capacity. I did 20 miles the other day and the battery was still at around 75%. It handles well, the hydraulic disc brakes are excellent, the lighting is good. This thing was expensive but IMO it was worth it. If I want to get somewhere fast I can kick it up into “turbo” mode and pedal along at about 20 mph. Generally I’m in no hurry so I just toodle along about 10 enjoying the scenery. And because it has an actual real shifter, not one of those stupid belt drives, it even works as a standard bike with the motor shut off so I don’t have to worry about getting stranded somewhere if something does go wrong.

The solar power system update: It is still working well. As noted before it’s knocked more than a third off my electric bill since I put it in. There have been no glitches or nasty surprises.

Sidenote: Just about all of the electric utility companies in the state are asking for significant increases in rates, one company wants to increase rates by 14% over the next two years. And they’ll probably get it, too. Plus there is talk that they’re going to force everyone to accept rate plans that will drastically increase their rates during peak times of the day. They haven’t put forward that plan yet, but there has been a lot of talk about it behind the scenes. That scheme would double what I pay per kilowatt hour during peak periods, pushing it up to somewhere between 32 cents to 40 cents per kWh.

And that’s about it for now!

Coming up: I’ll probably be babbling about amateur radio again in the near future. I have a new antenna on order that should be here soon so I’ll be talking about that.

I want to do a brief look at the Klein thermal imaging camera I picked up a while back. That’s turned out to be quite handy and a lot of fun to just play with too. I’m sure there will be other things tossed in as well.

Garden Catch Up

Egads, I haven’t written anything here in a long time so let’s get this started with catching up with what’s been going on in the gardens.

As you probably know by now we had what looks like the hottest summer of all time here in Wisconsin with average temperatures above normal all season long. On top of that we’ve been under drought conditions almost all summer as well. We just went through yet another multi-day heat wave, with high temperatures pushing 95F here. And now we’re finally going to be getting down to more seasonable temps. It’s currently about 55 here at 7 AM and won’t get much above 60 they tell me. We were supposed to get some badly needed rain as the cold front came through, but nope, except for some spotty showers we got pretty much zip.

But let’s look at some butternut squash…

Oops, wait a minute, that’s not a squash, that’s Solar Cat, isn’t it?

Ah, here we go, that’s the squash up there piled up in the old coaster wagon. And yes, they’re massive this year. We were watering those suckers almost every evening all summer long and now we’re finally getting our reward. They’re beautiful. MrsGF and I both love squash (she makes a squash soup that would probably make Gordon Ramsey jealous). But we sure as heck can’t handle all of those. We’ll end up giving a lot of them away to friends or anyone else who can use them. That’s part of the fun of gardening, giving stuff away to friends who don’t have the space to have a garden themselves or swapping our stuff for stuff other people grew that we didn’t have room for. In fact MrsGF just swapped one of those for a big bag of pears from one of our neighbors.

We tried a new variety of tomato this year, something called Amish Golden Slicers. We got the seed from Jung and they’ve been well above average. Tomatoes can come in a wide variety of colors ranging from gold to orange to red to purple to even green. What matters most is not color but flavor and texture. Some tomatoes are best for eating fresh, some are better for making sauces, some are in between. These are probably best for eating fresh. They have an amazingly lush, slightly tart flavor that I absolutely love, although MrsGF isn’t all that thrilled with them for some reason. We only put in 3 plants this year but that’s still more than we can eat fresh, so we’ve been making sauces and soups with them.

We put in lots of peppers of various types, bell, banana and jalapeno, and they’ve all been doing amazingly well this year for some reason. The bell peppers especially. They’re freaking huge this year. We’ve had to stake up some of the plants because the weight of the fruit has been making them fall over. Again way more than we can use ourselves so we’ve been giving those away too.

And of course there’s the jalapenos. We have 5 of those, two in pots on the front stairs and three in the raised beds. The two in pots didn’t do well but the ones in the raised bed have been producing way more than normal just like the bells have been.

MrsGF put in a couple of banana peppers just for some variety. We’ve always had good luck with banana peppers and this year is no exception. Lots of very nice fruits, good flavor.

Wax beans were just sad this year even though we watered them just about every day. I think it was just too hot for them.

Alas the wax beans did not do very well this year. I suspect that the heat didn’t help them any. The pole beans we put in weren’t the best either but with them it was because little four footed critters were nibbling them off almost as soon as they started to grow.

Then our son brought over this weird houseplant…

Oh, wait, that’s another cat, isn’t it? We catsat our youngest son’s kitty while he was gone on a three day weekend. That’s Kai the Wondercat. I love her. She hates me. Go figure.

And let’s wrap this up with some flowers because why not?

Catching Up

It’s been a while since I wrote anything here so let’s get caught up.

Haze from the Canadian wildfire smoke seems to be an almost permanent thing these days.

Smoke from the Canadian wildfires is still an issue here. I wish I’d kept track of the number of days we’ve been under air quality warnings because of it, but I haven’t bothered. I have respiratory allergies and this stuff hits me hard. For about four weeks straight I was on Claritin which did help, but I was still sniffling and sneezing and hacking until the air cleared up a bit.

The bell peppers are doing very well indeed this year. We’ve already started harvesting and eating these guys and some of the banana peppers.

The vegetable gardens are doing quite well despite the drought, but we’ve had to water everything pretty much every evening until just recently when we started to get a bit of rain. We’ve been harvesting wax beans every other day or so for about two weeks now. Some we eat fresh, most are blanched and bagged and frozen. The tomatoes are looking pretty good too with lots of young fruit on the vines.

MrsGF put in some jalapenos this year as well. We have a couple in pots in front of the house to make it easy to snag one to mince up to throw into an omelet or soup or something, and there are a couple out in one of the raised bed. Last year they didn’t do well at all for some reason but this year it looks like we’re going to get way more than we’ll need. I’m the only one who eats these things but I’m never going to be able to eat all of these so I’ll end up freezing a lot of them for use later.

We have a few “volunteer” sunflowers that popped up all on their own which happens sometimes. The birds and chipmunks drop the seeds from the bird feeder into the gardens. We generally leave them alone because, well, sunflowers are just fun.

First the smoke and then the extraordinarily hot weather we’ve had have been curtailing my biking. It’s hard to enjoy getting out on the bike when either the air is so think with smoke you can chew it or the temperatures are pushing up into the 90s. We had storms roll through last night that have brought a bit cooler temperatures and seem to have helped clear the air so maybe I can get out today and do a 10 or 15 mile ride. We’ll see.

Utility Companies Are Not Your Friends Department

For those of you in Wisconsin who might be thinking of setting up a solar power system and selling power back to your electric utility, don’t bother. It isn’t worth the time, effort or equipment costs. One of the big utilities has dropped the rate they pay to home solar owners down to a whopping 4 cents per kWh. Two more of the big utilities just applied for permission to drop the rate they pay down to 4 cents as well. Sigh…

Catching Up With Gardening

Egads, it’s been dry here, as it is in much of the rest of the country. We finally got a good rain yesterday and hopefully that will indicate that we’re getting out of this dry spell. Up until yesterday we were watering everything just about every day. But things have still been growing like crazy.

We have a little bit of everything in the raised bed this year. We have a several different types of lettuce, beets, carrots, onions, pole beans, tomatoes and peppers in the four raised beds this year and they’ve been doing pretty darned good as you can see from that picture up there.

We put in a lot of onions this year. We’ve had good luck with putting onions around the outside of all of the raised beds. There doesn’t seem to be much competition between the onions and whatever is growing in the main part of the beds as long as they get enough sunlight.

MrGf and I both love the flavor of home grown onions. They tend to have a much more intense flavor than the store bought variety. I don’t know if it’s just me, but it seems that over the years the commercial varieties we’ve been buying in the store seem to be becoming sweeter and having a less intense and less spicy onion flavor.

And we’re trying something new.

Those are brussel sprouts. We like to try growing something new every year and we picked brussel sprouts because, well, why not? So far they’ve been doing pretty good.

Most of the pepper plants went into a narrow bed along the south side of the house. We’ve put them in there before and they’ve always done very well. The biggest problem with that location is that it’s very dry there and we have to be especially careful to keep them well watered.

The wax beans and squash are doing quite well also, as you can see up there. All things considered the gardens have been doing pretty well. Some of the pepper plants and the tomatoes are starting to blossom already.

And, of course, we have flowers everywhere. We rarely water our decorative plants but somehow they’ve managed to make it through the drought.

I am a bit worried about the hostas, though.

We’ve never had to water the hostas in their location, but if we hadn’t started to get rain I think we would have. They were starting to look a bit rough around the edges, suffering from heat stress, I think. Days of 90 degree temperatures and the lack of rain was starting to get to them.

Anyway, that’s it for now.

More Flowers (Ooo, the excitement)

After a rather dreary and cool spring, summer has hit with a vengeance. Temperatures for the last few days have been abnormally hot, in the high 80s and low 90s, temperatures we usually don’t see until well into mid summer. It’s also been very dry. We haven’t had a decent rain in something like a month now. Grass normally doesn’t go brown and dormant around here until late July. My lawn is already as dry as dust and turning brown. Still, the flower beds seem to be enjoying it and it’s a riot of color out there.

There are the irises, of course. They’re looking absolutely stunning right now.

But if you stop and get down on the ground and peer around you’ll find little treasures as well, like these…

With the showy irises taking center stage it would be easy to overlook those little guys up there.

And no collection of flower photos would be complete without the first rose of the season.

That’s it for now. The weather changed drastically. We went from hot and dry to cold and wet which is actually something of a relief. We hadn’t had any rain in something like a month and a half before this weather system moved in so no one is complaining.